Behind every home lies a network of pipes, valves, and vents. Behind every relationship, an engineered performance of power, sublimation, and ego. In her debut solo album, Affectionately, Raisa K, a member of Good Sad Happy Bad (formerly Micachu and the Shapes), exposes the wiring and guts of both: the machinery of domesticity and the inner workings of love.
In London’s experimental DIY scene, where all roads lead back to Mica Levi, Raisa K has managed to create a work that stands outside their formidable shadow. One can still hear some of the same vernacular on Affectionately: the unreal poise, the wry melodies, the clattering soundscapes. But here, Raisa K deviates from the willfully primitive music of Good Sad Happy Bad to deliver something much more measured, refined, and complete. Maintaining the gestures of lo-fi rock while couching them within ambient-industrial soundscapes, Affectionately pushes its listener right between the walls of a home. The album feels wholly insulated and airtight.
The album seems to take place in the midst of romantic conflict, and its structure mirrors the rhythms of argument, vacillating between momentum and exhaustion. The music feels hot, stuffy, and stifling; Raisa K’s vigorously engineered and kettling beats sound like trapped air clanging inside hot radiators. There are hints of shoegaze in her fuzzed-out guitar tone, but where shoegaze presents a looming wall of sound, the mixdown here resembles a speaker enclosed behind drywall. The effect borders on the spectral, much the way a refrigerator’s hum can sound heavenly once you zone in on it. Raisa K toys with this kind of mundane psychedelia. Listen to the tiny metallic clanks buried within the wash of what sounds like a severely overheated laptop fan on “Both Still.” She invites only brief glimpses of the sentimental sounds of twinkling percussion, before overwhelming them with downsampled dust. She consistently yanks the sound back from transcendence, just barely stopping it short of touching that white-hot nerve in the soul. She carries this highly ambitious and admirable level of restraint across the whole album.
“The only thing that betters my mind is to be calm,” she sings on “How Did You Know,” with great composure. The line captures the album’s motivation: to find meaning in conflict by surrendering to one’s own serenity. “We can both say our piece/And we can still be at peace,” she sings on “Still,” and, “Don’t say a word yet/You need to calm down,” on “Come Down.” It takes great courage to look at the complexity of romantic friction as coolly as Raisa K does on Affectionately. She takes a direct and clarifying lens to love, maintaining a respectful pose throughout the entire album, and calmly leafing through difficult matters in the simplest terms possible.
This makes the payoff of “Stay,” the album’s most directly romantic song, even greater. Raisa K plays her guitar with a gittern-like quality, while she and featured vocalist Coby Sey trade the most forthrightly tender sentiments possible: “I love the way you love me, yeah.” That Raisa K still manages to look love squarely in the eye, even while under its duress, makes the emotional weight of the song downright knee-buckling.
When Raisa K could so easily give in to dramatic revelation, she consistently chooses instead to calmly lay out the facts. There’s no emotional convulsion or outpouring here; just a plain and brute document of love’s machinery. Her vocal melodies remain strictly low-key, seldom climbing up to an emotionally expressive resolve, while her production maintains painstaking precision. Raisa K treats sound as a perfectly engineered automaton, her atmospherics utterly engrossing despite being so coolly wrought. That keen and exacting level of observation is the true mark of affection.
